This may be a truth difficult to face—but there’s usually more problems the more something is valid, and the less we admit to it. Here is a truth so overwhelming, and felt inside by so many, but never spoken, so let’s do a service to the human race right now, and speak it.
Jealousy is not a negative byproduct of love.
Jealousy is love.
Love is jealousy.
They are the same.
Anything else is lust.
Love happens the moment you realize with horror how much someone can hurt you, because you have allowed yourself to emotionally invest acutely in the notion that you want this person for yourself. All other forms of love are a variation of this.
The simplest example will suffice to illustrate the true nature of love.
A man simply lusts after a woman. That guy would be happy, amused, pleased, excited, maybe even overjoyed, to watch this woman having sex.
A man is in love with a woman. That same guy would feel the very opposite—he would be horrified at the thought of watching the woman he loves having sex.
And this, in a nutshell, is the crucial difference between lust and love.
This example will not be a revelation. None should be surprised by it.
Why, then, does it strike most people as strange to state the truth that love is jealousy—which this example proves?
The objections are feeble. Let’s take them one by one:
“Free love is not jealous.”
Adding “free” to “love” is done for the very reason that jealousy is love—since “free” is precisely that which eliminates all feelings of jealousy—having to call it “free love” proves it is not love. Free love is either an arrangement of lust, or merely one of friendship. It is not love.
“Your example presents sexual jealousy, not jealousy.”
It is true our example conclusively divides love from lust—but what of love for a family member or friend? Filial or friendly love is not sexual—we don’t need an example to distinguish this kind of love from lust. Exactly. Which is precisely why we can set filial and friendly love aside without comment. It is already established that filial love is not amour—which is what we seek to define. And we define amour as jealousy—nothing more, nothing less. Common feelings of jealousy and affection will of course find their way, in some manner, into every human interaction on earth. It just so happens that sexual jealousy, not plain jealousy, is the cat that catches the mouse. We don’t care about terms or their universal applications, per se. We just want to catch our mouse. We want to see how things really are.
And what is left? A love of—automobiles? Perhaps we would not want our prize automobile to be in a porn film. If we really value and respect our car. Perhaps we wouldn’t care, or we would feel a little creepy driving our car around afterwards. But since it is a car, a thing, our sexual jealousy example does not pertain here, either. Sexual jealousy among human beings is the highest form of jealousy—for the important reason that lust, which most resembles love, is not love. And our example of sexual jealousy most strongly proves that lust is not love, even though there can (should!) be lust for the beloved.
Of course the man in our example would not want his car damaged, or scratched, if it were used in any film. And this brings us to the third objection.
“You use the word ‘jealousy,’ but isn’t real love more about protection, which is not the same thing as jealousy? We seek to protect our child, for instance. Love would allow a woman we love to win a beauty contest, if no harm or abuse came to her. If one were too jealous, one would not want any acclaim at all for the beloved. If one were too jealous, one would cover the woman in a veil and make her a second class citizen.”
The key term is “too jealous.” Yes, jealousy and protection are not the same. But an excess of jealousy is not jealousy, but something else, just as an excess of anything becomes something else than what it is. This is possessiveness, which is not the same as jealousy. Jealousy is still the operative word. A reasonable amount of jealousy is what defines love. A reasonable amount of jealousy denoted by: my wife can win a poetry prize, or earn more than me, but she cannot be the sexual prize of others.
Another objection: “Your example does not factor in morality, or other types of love. A moral person would not be ‘overjoyed’ by watching porn, but instead would be disgusted by watching anyone in a porn film. And, as mentioned above, no one would want family members in a porn film; it would be wrong; by equating love with jealousy, you are defining love in the negative sense.”
But our sexual jealousy example does use morality to define love. Without allowing morality to overwhelm the definition. Morality applies to a whole host of things. To shine morality into every crevice would brighten and dilute definition. True, a moral person would not want to watch porn at all. But our example is not about morals. We are not defining morality, but love. Even if one were to point out that porn is not immoral, our example is still valid, for it describes common feelings which are true; whether porn is immoral or not is beside the point—the example used at the beginning of our essay proves love is jealousy; it is not making a moral argument on porn.
The overwhelming point here is that a man would have no objection to watching a woman he only lusts after, in a porn film; but would object greatly to his true love doing the same. This is not about the protective impulse; this is not about morality. It is about one thing: sexual jealousy—which it seems to us, defines love.
We might observe at this point that jealousy seems to occupy a perfect middle ground in the moral spectrum; or, and perhaps this is the same thing, jealousy does not pertain to morals at all. Like love, jealousy is a behavior—which is not moral, or immoral, per se. We say it exists in the middle of the moral spectrum because on one hand it powerfully creates love and adoration for an individual, but on the other hand, it falls into cruelty and mania.
And here is one more objection to our theme that love is, in reality, jealousy itself:
“Don’t you need to define lust, since your sexual jealousy example attempts to distinguish lust from love? You owe it to your readers to do this, since one could argue that you have not proven love is jealousy, because most would still argue that love is simply a better-behaved lust—and this is all your porn-type example proves. And somewhere above, you said a lover will lust after his beloved. So it seems you must still come to terms with what lust is, before we accept that love is jealousy alone.”
Lust was used to catch the mouse; it worked in our example, and this is all that really matters. Love is jealousy, and that is all it is, and knowing what it is, will help love and lovers in the long run, who ruin love by judging jealousy too negatively. There may be those who simply cannot stomach any jealousy at all. Say goodbye to love, then. Closer to the truth, of course, is that those who say they hate jealousy object to jealousy in vain: jealousy, like love, is involuntary; it will occur, whether they want it to, or not. This essay is not attempting to proscribe love’s feelings—only make sense of them.
Define lust? It is hardly anything. A bit of chemical action in the blood. A sly sort of aesthetics. But we must be careful, for so often love is defined as, to quote ourselves, “a chemical action in the blood…a sly sort of aesthetics.” We must not let our philosophical ears listen to this siren song. For chemistry and aesthetics belong to the purely sensual—to lust. It is not love. Love is jealousy. To repeat our definition of love above: “Love happens the moment you realize with horror how much someone can hurt you, because you have allowed yourself to emotionally invest acutely in the notion that you want this person for yourself.”
When we say that love is a “better-behaved lust,” we do come very close to the truth (our mouse); because jealousy asks, in its love-stricken desperation, for lust to be better behaved. It is a jealous plea. True love is a plea of jealousy. If love isn’t jealous, it is not love.
Because true love is rare, and because feelings of lust are so common, and because love and lust are often mistaken for each other, despair that true love does not exist, afflicts many.
It may seem a strange way to cheer us up—denoting true love as jealousy. But it is jealousy, and this is why it hides and evades—as true love—so many. The good news is, we have caught the mouse, and now true love can flourish—because we know what it is.
Knowing what something is, is valuable for three reasons. One. We recognize what it is. Two. We recognize what it is not. Three. We recognize partial formations of it, which otherwise punish us, as the acute misunderstanding adds to the general confusion of our not quite recognizing it.
To call love a “better-behaved lust” is a cunning falsehood which will destroy all ability to know what love is—jealousy.
The crucial thing we have done in this essay is to divorce love from lust. And to do this, we have called love jealousy—I don’t want to see my true love in a porn film.
Here’s the tricky thing: Jealousy operates in a realm which has everything to do with lust, but which is saved, as love, at the final moment, from the jaws of lust. This is the greatest heroism there is—even though it is a quiet, private, psychological one.
Thanks to the recent Ted Cruz Twitter porn controversy, millions who don’t watch porn caught a glimpse of the Sadean strategy used by porn in the depictions of lust as an endless chain—jealously viewing sex and lustily having sex become united in the viewer’s mind. The danger here is that Sadean porn steals love’s jealousy-identity, to effectively present the lie that ‘better-behaved lust’ is love.
As a guy, I hate porn; the only thing I could stomach is a little bit of lesbian porn, which makes me foul enough. This essay is mostly a guy’s perspective; I confess I am befuddled by women’s sexuality, which I suppose is how it is meant to be.
Psychologists warn that porn can kill love, can kill a healthy, normal desire for love. Whether there is any truth to this at all, or not, it may be wise to observe the following as a final flourish to our essay.
The scene in the Cruz Twitter linked video is a (hidden) woman masterbating in the foreground, furtively glimpsing a sex act between a man and woman in the background. The added “view” of the woman in the foreground is what makes it more than just a depiction of sex. The woman in the foreground participates in the lust of the video, but in a removed, “jealous” manner (our example of love!) which drags the (masterbating?) viewer of the porn video itself into the viewing chain of lust (a potentially infinite chain!) and this simple but powerful perspective features jealousy as the chief emotion. Jealousy is introduced into the dramatic scene simply by having a person removed from the action, but witnessing the action.
Here is the Scene of Love.
Experts cannot be in the “chain.”
This essay cannot be used as advice.
No one can teach romance, or love.
This essay will help no one.
We have presented here (almost like the scene of a Renaissance painting) the simplest and most powerful truth of romantic love—for the lonely and the heartbroken—for whom romantic love may be a dearest wish.
